It’s not losing the race that hurts Frazier, but the fact that he couldn’t even be competitive in a Republican year. Frazier lost by 11 points to Perlmutter and received about 13,000 fewer votes than 2008 GOP candidate John Lerew, a guy whose own yard signs said “John Who?”

Not long after losing a double-digit race to Democratic Rep. Ed Perlmutter (CD-7) in the Republican wave year of 2010, Frazier doubled-down and ran for Mayor of Aurora in 2011…with nearly the same result. Frazier lost by 10 points to Steve Hogan in the “nonpartisan” Mayor’s race.

We haven’t seen or heard much from Frazier since his back-to-back beatdowns, although he occasionally pops up at 9News as a Republican “political expert” for reasons that we couldn’t begin to try to explain. So, why would anyone even consider Frazier for statewide office?

It’s easy to forget that Frazier was briefly a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2009, and at one point was even thought to be among the Republican frontrunners for that office before someone convinced him to drop out of the race and join the field in CD-7. If Frazier was ever going to try a political comeback, the 2016 Senate race might be his best chance — if only because Republicans can’t find anybody else to run — and he can at least point to a history of decent fundraising as a selling point (although fundraising would be considerably more difficult with a record of double-digit losses).

Is Ryan Frazier the best that Republicans can do in 2016? Well, no, actually, but the GOP has yet to find a decent candidate who is even somewhat interested in the race, so the NRSC probably has to at least listen to a Frazier pitch. If you think that Frazier couldn’t possibly be any worse than he was in 2010-11, you’d probably be correct. And that, of course, is exactly the problem.